I completely understand why you need to do this, but how about refunding any difference between the mark-up and the rate Revolut was able to achieve when the markets reopen?

At the moment, in order to avoid this mark-up, I have to estimate how much money I will spend in a foreign currency on the weekend, and do the exchange on Friday. It’s pretty annoying if I guess wrong, or forget to exchange before the markets close. I would feel a lot better about getting a “bad” rate on the weekend–and therefore better about using Revolut–if I know the difference will be refunded. (I assume you’re not actually trying to make money from this arrangement.)

As an aside, an easy way to figure out whether the mark-up is in operation is to use the rate converter feature to convert between e.g. GBP and USD, and tap each of the currencies a few times to change the “direction” of the exchange. If you still end up with almost as much as you started with after a few round trips, the markets are open.

This way you don’t have to think about whether the markets are actually open (is it a public holiday??), according to Revolut’s definition.

For card payments, yes. That’s how cards usually work, like you said. With Revolut, you can also exchange money and then send it via P2P when markets aren’t open. The money is available for the receiver in real-time and not after credit card settlement. This wouldn’t work like it does right now when conversion would be limited like you suggested.

I think this would be a good idea. If the rate during the weekend is worse than the one on Monday (and therefore Revolut didn’t have any losses), then it would make sense to refund the difference to the consumer.

I assume Revolut suspend the currency exchange if something unusual happens when the markets are closed (a coup?) and it looks like they’ll make a loss when they reopen. So as it stands Revolut is basically guaranteed to make money on weekend exchanges. Of course it’s fine for a business to want to make money, but this doesn’t seem like a good way of doing it!